Doctors said that the two-year-old, Yueyue, suffered serious brain damage and is expected to die after being struck as she stood on a narrow market street close to her family shop in Foshan, Guangdong.

"She was bleeding from her mouth and nose and I was scared to watch," Ms Lin, a local shop owner, told the Beijing News.

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Disgraceful … two-year-old Yueyue was run over by a van and ignored by several drivers and pedestrians before cleaner Chen Xianmei took her off the road and called for help.

"I thought of reaching out to help but I was a little scared because she was bleeding so much. So we soon left."

Ms Lin said she has since been consumed by "regret, compassion, pain and guilt".

Surveillance camera footage presented on internet sites and television shows the girl was hit by a van, which briefly stops but then continues on, crushing her with its rear wheels.

Chinese media quoted other drivers - who were not involved in the accident - as saying the van driver may have kept going because compensation for death was lower than for injury.

Yueyue, the Chinese toddler run over by two vehicles, was tended to by a trash collector.

The footage shows several pedestrians stepping around the critically injured girl.

A man on a scooter steers around her and looks at her body before continuing on his way, as a second van approaches and drives over her legs. Both drivers have since been detained.

Another motorcyclist applies his brakes and clearly looks at the girl, lying in a pool of blood, before driving off.

The scene is repeated as tricycle riders and pedestrians give her a wide berth. It is not until seven minutes after the van that a street cleaner, later identified as 58-year-old Chen Xianmei, comes to the girl's aid and lifts her from the road, calling for help.

The question of why bystanders in China appear relatively reluctant to help strangers in distress has long puzzled foreigners and researchers.

Millions of Chinese citizens are asking similar questions after the Yueyue tragedy was prominently reported in newspapers and the camera footage was posted and reposted across thousands of websites.

More than 1.5 million people have reportedly viewed the story online. "I am speechless … my heart is in pain and tears are flying," wrote a blogger under the name Qianse Langmange on a Shanghai website.

"I miss Mao's era, although it was poor there was social justice and fairness and people lived with dignity and moral integrity," wrote another blogger, under the name Nostalgic for Chairman Mao.

Other netizens were quick to blame China's political masters for a state of moral decay.

"Don't blame those passers by blame the society and blame those who manage the society," another, Xiao A, said.

A study by Professor Yunxiang Yan, an anthropologist at University of California, Los Angeles, found that China's traditional morality code still applies strictly to existing relationships but that it has struggled to adapt to a modern world where strangers frequently interact.

A reluctance to help has been exacerbated by prominent cases of extortion where Good Samaritans have been ripped off by those they have helped.

The argument is that the helper must have contributed to the injury otherwise they would not have helped.